On October 4, 1951, shortly before noon, a heavy man in a good suit sat at a table in a small restaurant called Joe's Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. The town sits on the cliffs above the Hudson, directly across the river from Manhattan. He had ordered nothing yet. He was waiting for company.
Four men came in and sat down with him. They knew him, and he knew them. By the accounts of the people who were there, the conversation was friendly. Then the waitress went into the kitchen, and there were shots.
When the police arrived, the man was on the floor and the four men were gone. Within a few days, the men who had arranged the killing would describe what they had done with a word that does not appear anywhere else in these stories. They called it a mercy.
His name was Guarino Moretti, and everybody called him Willie. He was the underboss of the organization that would soon be called the Genovese crime family, which made him one of the four or five most powerful gangsters in the United States. The people who killed him were his own.
He was born in New York in 1894 and grew up in East Harlem alongside a boy named Frank Costello. The two came up together and stayed together for the whole of their lives. Where Costello went, Moretti went, and when Costello rose, Moretti rose behind him.
Costello became the boss. Moretti became the man who ran New Jersey. Then came Prohibition, and Prohibition made all of them. For 13 years, the most profitable business in the United States was illegal, and the men who ran it in New York were the men who would run everything else for the next 40 years.
Costello and Moretti were in the middle of it, moving liquor across the Hudson and up the Jersey Shore. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, they were no longer street boys. They were partners of a man named Charles Luciano.
When Luciano was sent to prison in 1936, for a term that amounted to the rest of his working life, the organization he had built needed somebody to run it. For a short while, that somebody was Vito Genovese. Then Genovese was wanted for a murder, and in 1937 he left the country for Italy and stayed there for the whole of the war.
The man who ran things in his absence was Frank Costello, and the man who stood behind Costello was Willie Moretti. That arrangement tells you something about both of them. Costello was the diplomat of that generation, the man who dealt with judges and politicians and did not like to be photographed. Moretti was the opposite. He liked people. He liked a room, and he liked being the man in the middle of it.
Costello could not have run Bergen County the way Moretti did, and he knew it. For 20 years, he did not try.
It is worth understanding what New Jersey meant, because it is not a glamorous piece of territory in the way Manhattan is. It was better than glamorous. It was quiet. Bergen County sits across the river from the city, close enough to drive to in 20 minutes and far enough away to have its own police, its own politicians, and its own way of doing things.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, it was one of the most profitable gambling territories in the country, and the man who ran it was Willie Moretti. The money came from horse rooms, card games, dice, and a string of places along the Palisades that were officially restaurants and were mostly something else.
The best known was a place called Duke's in Cliffside Park, across the road from the amusement park. Duke's was where the organization met when it did not want to meet in New York. It belonged, on paper and in practice, to a man named Joe Adonis, who had come across from Brooklyn when Brooklyn got too warm for him and who ran the New Jersey side of things alongside Moretti for most of the 1940s.
They made a good pair. Adonis was handsome and careful and preferred to be left alone. Moretti was the one who knew everybody's name.
It did not last forever. In 1950, the state of New Jersey finally sent a prosecutor into Bergen County who could not be reached, and the gambling case that followed took most of a year. Adonis pleaded guilty in the spring of 1951 and went to prison, and several of the men around Moretti went with him. Moretti himself was not convicted in that case. By then, the state was the least of his problems.
Moretti was, by every account, good at this. He was generous, he was funny, and people liked him, which in that trade is worth more than fear. He paid his people well. He kept the local authorities comfortable, and for the better part of 20 years, nothing in Bergen County happened that he did not know about.
He lived openly. He had a house on the shore at Deal. He was seen at the track. He was photographed at dinners with people who would later wish they had not been at those dinners. There was nothing furtive about him, and that was part of how it worked. A man who is plainly enjoying his life does not look like a man with anything to hide.
His brother was in the business with him. Salvatore Moretti, known as Solly, ran the day-to-day of the gambling while Willie was the face of it. When the Bergen County case came, it was Solly who went to prison. By the accounts of the time, he died there the following year, still inside.
It is one of the small facts of this story that gets left out, and it should not be, because it means that in the last year of his life, Willie Moretti had already lost the one man who could run things quietly on his behalf.
There is one story about him that most people have heard without knowing it is about him. In the early 1940s, a young singer from Hoboken was under contract to a bandleader named Tommy Dorsey, and the contract was ruinous. It took a large share of the singer's earnings for life.
The story goes that Moretti visited Dorsey, that the conversation was short, and that the singer was released. The singer was Frank Sinatra, and the scene that story became is in a film that everybody has seen. It has never been proven. Sinatra denied it his whole life, and there are people who have looked hard at it and think it did not happen the way it is told.
What is not in dispute is that Moretti and Sinatra knew each other, that Sinatra was from his territory, and that the story was believed by exactly the people it was useful to have believe it.
By the late 1940s, something was wrong with Willie Moretti, and everybody around him could see it. It was said, and it has been said ever since, that he had contracted syphilis as a young man, that the disease had never been treated properly, and that by the time he was in his 50s it had reached his brain.
Whether that was the cause or not, the effect was plain. He talked. He had always been talkative. Now he could not stop. He said things in public that were not supposed to be said anywhere. He gave interviews. He made jokes about the organization to people who had no business hearing them.
In that world, there are two things that get a man killed reliably. One is betrayal, the other is talking. And the organization does not distinguish between talking on purpose and talking because you cannot help it.
Something else had changed by then, and it matters. Vito Genovese had come home. He had spent the war in Italy, and he had spent it comfortably in ways that were never fully cleared up. When the American army arrived in 1944, he attached himself to it as an interpreter, and it was an American army investigator who eventually noticed that the helpful interpreter was wanted for murder in Brooklyn.
He was shipped back to New York in 1945 to stand trial. The trial never really happened. The main witness against him, a man named Peter La Tempa, had been held in protective custody in a Brooklyn jail, and in January of that year, before Genovese had even landed, he was found dead in his cell after taking what was supposed to be medicine for his stomach. With him went the case.
In 1946, the judge who dismissed it made it plain from the bench that he thought the case had been destroyed rather than disproved. Genovese walked out a free man, and he wanted his old position back.
Costello had the top. Moretti had New Jersey and the number two seat. Genovese, for the second half of the 1940s, had to wait, and he was not a man who waited well.
In December of 1950, the United States Senate came for him. The Kefauver Committee was a traveling investigation into organized crime that went from city to city for more than a year and called several hundred witnesses. It was the first time most Americans saw the men they had been reading about.
The hearings were on television. The country stopped to watch. It is difficult now to convey what that meant in 1951. Television was new. The sets were in a minority of homes, and the hearings were broadcast in the daytime. In New York, the audience was estimated in the millions. Cinemas showed them. Offices put sets in the lobby.
For a few weeks, the most watched program in America was a row of senators asking careful questions of men who did not want to answer them. Most of the witnesses did what their lawyers told them, which was to invoke the Fifth Amendment to every question and say nothing. Frank Costello, when his turn came, refused to be filmed above the neck, and the cameras spent the hearing pointed at his hands.
Willie Moretti did not do that. He sat down in front of the committee on December 13, 1950, and he talked. He was cheerful. He was expansive. He told the senators that everything was a racket these days, that he knew a great many people, that he had never made a secret of what he did. He invited them to visit him at his house on the shore.
When the chairman thanked him for his candor, it was not entirely a joke. The newspapers loved him. He was the only witness in the whole investigation who seemed to be enjoying himself.
Some of what he said has survived in the record. Asked how he came to know so many of the men the committee was interested in, he said that he had met them the way anybody meets anybody, at the track, at dinners, in the ordinary course of things, and that a man who is well known cannot help who says hello to him. Asked whether he belonged to anything, he said he belonged to nothing but his family and his friends. He was, the reporters noted, the only witness who smiled.
And that was exactly the problem. The other witnesses had been sullen and evasive and had given the public nothing, which was the point. Moretti had been charming, and charm is a form of information. Every joke he made told the country a little more about how comfortable that world was with itself. And the men he worked for watched every minute of it.
Their underboss had just spent an afternoon in front of the United States Senate on television in a good mood talking. He had said nothing that convicted anybody. But the thing that keeps that organization alive is not that nobody says anything damaging. It is that nobody says anything at all. And Willie Moretti had just demonstrated to the entire country that he was a man who could not be relied on to keep his mouth shut.
The argument for killing him was made by Vito Genovese. Genovese was a senior figure in the same organization. He had wanted the top of it for years. And Costello and Moretti were the two men standing between him and it.
He argued that Moretti had become a danger to everybody, that his mind was going, that the next time somebody put a microphone near him, nobody could say what would come out.
Costello resisted. This was his friend from childhood. His answer was that Moretti should be sent somewhere quiet, looked after, kept away from microphones, and allowed to decline in private. For a while, that is what happened. Moretti was eased out of the day-to-day running of things and spent time away. And then he came back, and he started talking again.
In the end, the decision was made without Costello or over him. And the way it was justified afterwards is the thing this story is really about. They said it was a mercy killing. That was the phrase. Genovese is reported to have used it himself.
The idea was that Moretti was a sick man who was going to embarrass himself and everybody around him, and that a quick end in a restaurant among friends was kinder than what was coming. Kinder to him, they said.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because it is a remarkable piece of reasoning. An organization that killed a man to protect itself found a way to describe the killing as a favor to the man. And there is a second thing in it, which is that Genovese, who benefited from the killing more than anybody alive, was the man supplying the compassionate explanation for it.
How the decision was actually taken is one of the things nobody has ever been able to establish. There are accounts of a meeting and accounts of a vote and accounts that put Albert Anastasia in the room on one side or the other, depending on who is telling it. None of it can be checked. What can be said is that by the late summer of 1951, the question of Willie Moretti had an answer, and that Costello, whatever he thought of it, did not stop it.
On the morning of October 4, 1951, Willie Moretti drove to Joe's Elbow Room on Palisade Avenue in Cliffside Park. It was a place he knew and used. He sat down and waited. Four men joined him. They talked in Italian, and the waitress who served them later said the mood was easy. Then she went into the kitchen.
He was shot in the head and the face several times at close range. He was 57 years old. The men who did it had been sitting at the table with him, and they walked out through the front door. Nobody was ever charged.
The police in Cliffside Park did what police do in these cases. They took statements from the waitress and the owner. They circulated descriptions. They questioned men in New York and New Jersey who were known to have known him. The descriptions were vague. And the men who were questioned had not seen anything.
Within a month, the case was where it would stay. The four men were never identified in any court. There have been names put forward over the years, and some of them are probably right. But nobody has ever answered for it. And at this distance, nobody will.
One man was picked up within weeks. He was a Brooklyn figure with a long record, and the newspapers reported his arrest as though it were the end of the story. It was not. The charge did not survive for want of a single witness who would say what he had seen, and he went home. He was shot dead himself in Brooklyn seven years later in a case that was never solved either.
His funeral was one of the largest New Jersey had seen. Thousands of people came. There were flowers from men whose names would have interested the Kefauver Committee a great deal.
Frank Costello went on for a few more years. And then Genovese came for him, too. A gunman shot Costello in the head in the lobby of his own apartment building in 1957 and missed. Barely. Costello took the hint and retired.
And Vito Genovese finally had the organization that carries his name to this day. He had it for about two years before a narcotics conviction put him in prison for the rest of his life. But before the prison, there was the year that the Moretti killing had made possible.
In May of 1957, a young man walked into the lobby of Costello's apartment building on Central Park West, called out his name, and shot him. The bullet went round the side of his head instead of through it. Costello lived, refused to identify anybody, and understood the message perfectly.
Five months later, in October, Albert Anastasia was shot in a barber's chair in a Manhattan hotel with a hot towel over his face. Whoever had been in the room for the Moretti decision, and on whichever side, was now either dead, retired, or Vito Genovese.
A month after that, in November of 1957, Genovese called the leadership of the organization together at a house in the countryside of upstate New York, at a place called Apalachin, to confirm what he had taken. The state police noticed the cars. Some 60 men were caught walking through the woods in silk suits, and the meeting that was supposed to crown him became the single most embarrassing day in the history of the American Mafia. Two years later, the narcotics case put him away. Everything he had killed for, he held for less than two years.
Willie Moretti is remembered now, when he is remembered, for two things. One is a scene in a film about a singer and a bandleader that may never have happened. The other is the word his killers used.
Every man in this series died for a reason that the people who killed him could state. He talked, or he owed, or he refused, or he was in the way. Moretti is the only one whose death was described by the men who arranged it as being for his own good.
There is no version of that word which survives contact with the facts. He was killed in a restaurant by four men he trusted, on the orders of a man who wanted his job, and then his job was taken.
The house at Deal was sold. Duke's closed, and the amusement park across the road from it ran on for another 20 years, and then it closed, too. There are apartment towers on the cliff top now where the roller coaster was. Joe's Elbow Room is gone. Palisade Avenue is an ordinary street of shops, and there is nothing on it to say that anything happened there.
Frank Costello lived until 1973 and died in his bed. He had outlived nearly everybody, and by every account he never spoke about Willie Moretti in public for the rest of his life, which for a man who dealt in words was its own kind of statement.
But it is what they called it, and nobody has ever come up with a better name for it, and so that is the one it has kept.